Jack Nicholson was synonymous with the Showtime Los Angeles Lakers. He sat courtside at their games at the Great Western Forum. He participated in promotional photos.
Occasionally, he invited them to parties at his house in Beverly Hills. One summer night, Nicholson tended bar. The Lakers had just defeated the Detroit Pistons in an exhausting Game 7 to win the 1988 NBA championship.
The postgame party had spilled from the locker room to On The Rox, a private club on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Advertisement Lakers forward Mychal Thompson walked to the bar, surprised to see Nicholson, a few months removed from his ninth Academy Awards nomination. In a recent interview with The Athletic , Thompson paused while relaying this memory.
“Let me see if I can imitate him,” he said. “What do you have, Mychal?” Thompson said in Nicholson’s famous drawl, one that’s delivered some of the most iconic lines in cinema. Thompson laughed.
“That was so cool I couldn’t believe it,” he said. Today, celebrity super fans are the norm, but perhaps no one has been more associated with a team, or a sport, than Nicholson has with the Lakers and the NBA . On Sunday, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame will add Nicholson, as well as actor Billy Crystal, director Spike Lee and businessman and Philadelphia 76ers fan Alan Horwitz, to its James F.
Goldstein SuperFan Gallery, the latest honor for a man who long ago integrated Hollywood and hardwood. For most of his adult life,.
